3D Artist

Corona for Cinema 4D Review

A few days ago a new renderer has made its way to our beloved software Cinema 4D . Corona renderer has been out for sometime now for other 3D packages and is being developed constantly to add new features and fixing bugs with each release and now its available for Cinema 4D , but what is Corona renderer ? Corona renderer is a CPU unbiased/biased rendering engine that is able to deliver high quality ( photorealistic) renders , its now in Alpha testing phase and by the time this article was written , Corona for both Cinema 4D and 3DS Max is free.

The Cinema 4D port of the renderer shows quite a promise as its proven to be stable and bugs free for the first public release , however it only provides basic rendering features , and its going to expand in the future to add more , its also worth mentioning that the core of the renderer uses ( and will continue to ) to use the latest by the developers which is used for other platforms .

First impressions

Corona does really delivers high quality renders in acceptable time thanks to its unbiased ray tracing capabilities , and at the same time its presented in a simple to use user interface which is well integrated into Cinema 4d , the material editor is somewhat similar to the Cinema 4D one and provides you with the needed layers to create your materials with a very fast material preview sphere/shapes .

mat2

Rendering with Corona for Cinema 4D

The progressive renderer can be really useful and if you have used the physical renderer you should be familiar with how progressive renderers work , and the render times are very acceptable too . overall Corona can definitely be a great tool to have once the more advanced features are add into it , nonetheless this first release has almost what it takes to render realistic stills without a lot of effort . The image below is an example of that and in it i used what was available in the pre-release edition as a beta tester . ( with very little and almost no post processing )

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Lighting with Corona for Cinema 4D

The lighting at the moment is at its basic form supporting HDR and adding its own Sun and Sky system and of course there is also different shapes of the area light , here are some example render for the interior scene using an HDRI and the results looks really decent with accurate lighting even with the limited exposure range on the HDR image used here ( the above image was rendered using a Corona Sun and Sky ) .

House

Corona shows a real potential so far for Cinema 4D users and hopefully it will be developed more in the future to add more of the essential features for production work and even animation projects as most c4d users are using Cinema 4D primarily for animation .

Learn more about the renderer and give it a try at corona-renderer.com . ( available for windows only )